toward a definition of 'good' baking
i’ve spent a lot of time thinking about baking this year. more than usual. i think this is true for most of us who’ve had the privilege of surplus time in 2020.
in the spring i became totally obsessed with the act of baking. this is a cycle common among most of my independent pursuits: i impulsively take up a task which then begins to swallow up more and more of my time until it feels that i have time for nothing but said task. i lose sleep imagining where this new task can take me (to an original recipe for a double chocolate cookie topped with homemade kettle chips, in this case). i imagine that this is what it feels like to have an affair.
baking was a pretty average thing to pin one’s hopes to this spring, like i mentioned earlier. you couldn’t log on without seeing tweets about fresh bread, tweets about the excess of doughy tweets, photos of people’s triumphs in the kitchen, and photos of people’s failures. time and again i felt my belief in my new (so totally minuscule) revelation renewed: a good baker isn’t someone who can make something that tastes good, a good baker is someone that can make things that both taste good and look good.
i know, i know, this isn’t much of a revelation. in fact i feel quite self-congratulatory for labelling it as such. yet i do feel that i’ve moved through life thinking that tastiness was the best possible outcome for a new dessert, when honestly i think in fact it’s simply a satisfying consolation prize. i spent months taking my anger at the world out on drippy icing and too-gooey chocolate chip cookies.
don’t get me wrong, i love plenty of foods that look ugly and i think most cookies are the edible equivalent of a person who you’d describe as having a great personality. to the same end, i’d rather eat spoonfuls of chocolate chip cookie bits that have been scraped from a sheet pan than macarons, their entrancing french relatives that are usually at best satisfying texturally. i think that fondant icing is god-defying, i don’t want to eat food that wants to hide its true identity.
what i mean to say, i suppose, is that a quality baked good is like a face awash in “natural” makeup. you’re saved the the cookie’s grotesque interior reality (its sugar granules, its buttery stickiness), yet you don’t feel overwhelmed by artifice. in the kitchen, there’s nothing quite as gratifying as a perfectly round sugar cookie or a beautifully bulbous loaf of bread.